‘The starting point of Post-Modernism, curators suggest, is the question “where am I from?” But now, thanks to such innovations as the internet, we need no longer define ourselves within traditional boundaries. The artist is a wanderer, drifting about in space and time, drawing from a vast, fluid fund of collective ideas. And his or her work is far less about a single finished object than about continuing processes of development and connection in which one thing always seems to be leading to the next.’

‘The most optimistic message is that artists, fed up with the idea of the brand, the one-liner, the shock factor, appear to be searching for a fresh way forward. The most pessimistic is that they haven’t found it yet.’

here are my notes…some defining characteristics of relational works
-turning gallery into a social space
-including viewers
-hybrid of performance art & installation art
but different from performance art because its the viewer who performs by responding to the created context and different from installation because have to use the space to discern meaning or value.
-a collective presence
-social interaction

The disillusionment of commodifiable
no longer producer of Art object but of an encounter

The work envisages audience as a community, many people experiencing the work together and interacting with each other in the context set up by the work instead of the traditional idea that the viewer are isolated individuals- with one to one relationship with the work.

Idea of tradition one to one experience is that it transcends/eclipses reality

Reading: Micheal Fried- Art and Objecthood

Modernist theory- the traditional viewer of art audience
“presence is grace”
Art absorbs us and suspends us from the world (the everyday and we forget or transcend our context)
Private and alone the viewer is eclipsed by the work
60’s -70’sRosalind Krauss (predominate art academic) say its a myth

Don't no the name of the piece

Dan Grayham installation 1970’s
A room with 2 mirrored walls and a surveillance camera recording and relaying to a screen with an 8 second delay.

-viewers become more and more self conscious

If 70’s art was about understanding our perceptual relationship to others,
then 90’s art had more urgency, more political emphasis- less philosophic more about actual relations.

“capitalism depends on an idea of the privatised individual consumer, leading to an interest in producing works of art that emphasises our status as social or collective subjects, there’s been an resurgence of interest in collectivity and community in last 15 years which is in opposition to the idea that capitalism erodes the social bonds” -Claire Bishop

Reflected in many works thatquestions (the problematic of) individual and society- like use with the collective really having to consider us as individuals and us in or as the group

Rirkrit Tiravanija came to success cos …

Recession of early 90’s
A rise of galleries taking more experimental approach to showing art, he produced a work where he relocated the gallery storage zone and office into the exhibition space and turned the back room in to the usable space- with tables and food, work was about what happen and then there was the traces of activities.

Institutional critiques
Micheal Asher’s installation- 1976
Took out a wall of the gallery exposing the office, The director of the gallery and staff
So you see the business side -sense of economic

Nicolas Bourriaud coin the term Relational Art, this art came about as the reactions to now…

-Internet and do it yourself attitude
-Economy shift- not an economy of goods producers but of service industries
-erosion of social relationships in a society governed by market pressures
-individualism and consumption

The Society of The Spectacle, 1967 Guy Debord
A manifesto riling against the divisive and alienating effects of capitalism.
Capitalism prompted collapse of collective identity and produced society of passive alienated individuals
“ people are united but only in their separation from each other, it is a false relationship of togetherness that is constructed and controlled by commercial interests”

Today examples are programmes like Big Brother with its false relationships generated spectacle, public to the house mates… celebrities

he called for more authentic social relationships based on active engagement rather than passive consumption

In the 1960’s
change and optimism
student protests-(didn’t work out, didn’t change the world into utopian dream)

Then Post-modernism – A hostile reaction to Modernism with its ideas of Progress and Utopia
Art and Theory became preoccupied with difference- identity, class, race and gender etc.

SOLUTION- Microtopia- mini utopia- RELATIONAL WORK LIKE RIRKRITS…
Small scale harmony- No grand scheme for world to follow
Not solve worlds problems just make things a bit better in the here and now

Instead of trying to change our world artist are simply “learning to inhabit the world in a better way” (Nicolas Bourriaud)‘It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows’

Do it yourself/Microtopian ethos
core of relational artificial
-Relief of possible totalitarian peril of utopia
-Reluctance to impose big ideas on other people

Immanuel Wallerstein book Utopistics

NEGATIVES OF Microtopia- this sort of work
Too quickly resign to compensatory gestures
Can’t change world so just change immediate surroundings- (lots just in gallery)
Not very ambitious

compared to say Russian Constructivist- ‘Art for the people! Art into Life!’, proclaimed the Russian Constructivists in 1917
Try to form a better world through design,clothing, art, architecture etc.
good design = harmony

with Relational Aesthetics… seem no real change… ???

Every utopia has a border and limit
They are always defined negatively by what they are not!

Thomas Hirschhorn
-work at the limit and border of social interactions
early work 90’sRoad memorial- appropriated everyday sculptural materials and objects
but as altars to artist not to an anonymous dead people

OUTSIDE ART CONTEXT-Risk not being read as a work of art at all
like many artist working in public arena regards any interaction as positive even destruction

Ulounge-about theme of utopia… exert from Tate website
“Thomas Hirschhorn brings two works to the poker party. One is Hotel Democracy (2003), which he describes as ‘a sculpture of an uncertain building embodying different concepts, realisations, misunderstandings, perversions, hopes, dreams and disasters of democracy’. Peering into this huge, two-storey, 44-room structure, we see creepy kid-size furniture and political posters – American, Chinese, Iranian, Swiss – each of them representing the souring of a sweet, precious principle. U-Lounge (2003) is very different: a sort of cultural laboratory-cum-hotel lobby built into the gallery’s structure that makes use, in a hopeful gesture, of its river views. The visitor is provided with books, videos and copies of works by the Vorticists and Marcel Duchamp. As the ‘U’ suggests, this is a utopian space – somewhere to sit, read, talk and think – embodying the artist’s belief that humanity’s paradise ‘is inside art, philosophy and poetry’. Reflecting on the show’s title, Hirschhorn has said: ‘Democracy is the “common”, utopia is the real “wealth”.’ With U Lounge, he plays the part of the rich man bearing alms.”http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue8/commonwealth.htm

His monument to Bataille for Documenta 11( every 5 years most important contempoary art exhibiton)

like many relational works its temporary and made of cheap shody materials, not grand in appearance.

Monument to Bataille was miles for art gallery.. set in many locations in and around a poor housing estate and you had to wait for a speical local cab to take you too and from… tension- social zoo effect-locals and visitors watching eachother… very different people and socail back grounds the vistors… many were wealthy art people coming into very deprived area.
Uneasy – Not idealising human behaviour… IT IS IN OUR NATURE … not to get along with everyone to fight and hate as well as thing love and respectConfront human social limits
created these very fragile encounters

all this 24 mins of a talk…. lots to think about in relation to our work and aims for the future!